My first Eth rig.. but w/ POS too late? :/

[siforek]

I'm sure proof of stake is covered here like a billion times but after deciding to build a rig(or 2), ordering a few of the new AsRock H110's & just assuming POS wouldn't happen soon enough to care I finally took the time to learn enough to worry. Sure I can mine Classic, Zcash etc. but as will everyone else after POS which will undoubtably effect difficulty/value/profitability.

So my question is at this point in the game as a somewhat n00b(I have 1 Antminer) what would you mine if you you were just starting out? Also with what cards/software would you suggest?

I'm sure my current plan of mining w/ethOS until POS then switching to Classic or Zcash isn't horrible BUT while I was initially planning on using 1070s & quickly disregarded any 4GB cards due to long term DAG size, as I understand it I could get away with using far less than 8GB cards with Zcash?

Things change & I'll need to adapt as they do but I just want to make sure that I'm making sound decisions here. As you know 13GPUs isn't cheap(go big or go home right?) so while I'm sure I'd still be profitable switching from one altcoin to another, I would think that one might build a zcash or other rig slightly different than one specifically for eth/classic.

Also is ethOS worth buying only to use for 4-6 months?

Thanks in advance, any help is greatly appreciated! I'm new here but I suspect I'll be spending quite a bit of time here in the coming months/years

[fanatic26]

1. PoS is a long ways off. It really shouldnt factor into building a rig. PoS should be synonymous with FUD at this point. Even when it is first implimented only 1 out of 100 blocks will be PoS. They dont even know if it will work yet.

2. Personally I would recommend another mining distro like PiMP as it supports 15+ algos right out of the box versus ethOS which is much more limited.

[dandreark1]

Pretty sure this isn't a trade secret at this point although I don't see as much talk as I expected on this subject.. I dedicated my workers from eth to zec and it's paying off in a big way with a ton of 1080ti's..
Yeah eth difficulty is always rising and at a point wont be profitable enough to mine, currently still is.. In my case atleast and many others. But i don't mine it anymore.

Not too late to build a rig IMHO but I really wouldn't set your expectations towards 'profiting heavily off mining eth'..

My suggestion is go with Nvidia chipsets, 1070/1080ti .. eth @ 27/32 Mh/s and zcash @ 430/700 sols/s  ..Nvidia cards will give you resell you'll want down the road. And overall a more capable chipset. I run all Nvidia cards on FullZero's nvOC_17 software and I couldn't be happier

Like fanatic said PoS is a long way off don't let that deter you from getting into mining.. but I can say, have a strategy. People go blindly into mining and don't look enough at all the moving parts; and how quickly things change. Don't invest more than you're willing to lose

[siforek]

Thanks for the feedback! The mention of FUD & the fact that POS won't happen all at once does make me feel a lot better. Who knows, it could be another year before the 1st of 100 blocks is POS & even then they could go back to all POW for some reason. I'm still trying to figure out exactly why they'd want to switch to POS in the 1st place. Sure I get there are advantages but from my understanding, which I'll admit is somewhat limited, is that POS would have to be WAY superior in order to change the way the entire network runs. Anyway, no need to make this into yet another POS thread..

PiMP actually looks really good & I'll definitely have to give it a shot! As for cards I was leaning towards 1070s, but now am considering 1080TIs or even the new 6GB mining 1060s. The 1080s would have higher resale & obviously higher hash rate but the 1060s would be much more power efficient.. This is a battle I'm sure we all go through quite often, especially when even more than price, power efficiency & hash rate you have to factor in whether or not you can even get the cards you want.

On that note any feedback on buying used cards? Although even if the eBay listing says "only used for gaming" I'd still expect they'd be mined & while I've had good results buying other used/refurbished electronics, I'm not sure of any other downsides to buying used cards other than maybe having to clean a bunch of the previous owner's dust/dog hair etc out of them lol.
Or is my best bet to just buy all new cards?

Thanks again for your help! Just got my motherboards this morning, put together a rough CAD & am going to start building my rig/case this weekend

[siforek]

Also I'm not sure if my #s are wrong or something but based on https://youtu.be/dxNRQjnLch4?t=25 if a 1070 does 30MH/s at 160watts & a 1080ti does 36MH/s at 250watts than the 1070s are more efficient using ~1.61watts less per MH/s.

And I've looked at some of the dual cards like the R9 390x2 which as I understand it is just 2 390s right? But they have 1 PCIe connection? Does that mean I could technically use 13 of them with the ASRock H110 & get the equivalent of 26 x 390s???